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MIT's Director of MediaLab, Joi Ito, has stated that researchers at his lab will be able to create a hologram, much like Princess Leia's in Star Wars, within a year.

If you are a big Star Wars fan, you must remember the rather classic release ‘Star Wars IV: A New Hope’ which was the first release of the saga. In the movie, Princess Leia uses a hologram to send a secret message to Obi-wan Kenobi, a message which is delivered through a hologram. MIT is now on the verge of building an exactly similar hologram, hoping to deliver it within a year.

Science fiction has often led the way for technological development and this seems very true in the case of Star Wars. The saga popularized the notion of holograms which then lead to their popular use in science fiction movies and novels.

Since quiet some time, different researchers have been trying to actually turn this fictitious piece of technology into a reality. Some have had little success but now, MIT researchers are on the verge of making it happen.

In fact, according to the Director of MIT’s MediaLab, Joi Ito, they already have the technology to project a full-motion hologram, but the hardware that has to be used is too heavy to be practical as of this moment.

However this is changing fast, he says, and soon the MediaLab researchers will be able to trim down the size of the hardware to actually create a very compact hologram, much like Princess Leia’s. According to him, “The next version we’re going to have is going to be about the size that you will fit inside an R2-D2. And we will be able to transmit the hologram over the Internet. Within the year we’ll have a reasonable-size thing.”

Naturally, this news is very exciting and we are eagerly waiting for a niftier hologram to become a reality so that we could send our messages in a far more interactive and fun manner.

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